Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation

Although the themes of women’s complicity in and resistance to war have been part of literature from early times, they have not been fully integrated into conventional conceptions of the war narrative. Combining feminist literary criticism with the emerging field of feminist war theory, this collection explores the role of gender as an organizing principle in the war system and reveals how literature perpetuates the ancient myth of “arms and the man.”

The volume shows how the gendered concep...